[Xquartz-dev] hi, and a few opening questions

[Paul Davis]

i just joined the xquartz-dev mailing list. i'm the lead developer of
ardour (http://ardour.org/) which is a digital audio workstation that
runs on linux and OS X. 

i've spent several months now working on both ardour itself and the port
of GTK+ (which is the GUI toolkit that ardour uses) to Quartz. a few
days ago, i finally bothered to compare the performance of ardour on
Tiger when built with GTK/X11 versus its performance when built with
GTK/Quartz.

the difference was terrifying. the GTK/Quartz version uses twice the
overall CPU cycles that the GTK/X11 one does. i started digging into
this and at the moment, i am fairly convinced that its Cocoa that is the
major issue.

rather than bore this list with those specific issues however, what i
wanted to ask was whether or not xquartz does/will/will not address the
original issues that led us in search of a "native" version: drag-n-drop
from non-X11 windows, and integration with the main menu bar model
(neither of these are sensibly possible with the X11.app that predates
Leopard). can an X11 application use these facilities without gross
hacks and kludges? if not, is this expected at some point?

thanks,
--p